Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones

Blurb: Hana Doda is an ambitious literature student in cosmopolitan Tirana. Mark Doda is a raki-drinking, chain-smoking shepherd, living alone deep in the Albanian mountains. In fact, they are the same person. When Hana’s dying uncle calls her home from the city, he asks her to marry a local boy in order to run the household. Unable to accept the arranged marriage but resolved to remain independent, she must vow in accordance with Albanian tradition to live the rest of her life in chastity as a man – and becomes Mark. There is no way back for a sworn virgin. Years later Mark receives an invitation to join a cousin in Rockville, Washington DC. This is Mark’s chance to escape his vow and to leave Albania for modern America. But what does he know about being a woman? (And Other Stories, May 2014)

Jane Shilling, New Statesman

“Her novel, beautifully translated by Clarissa Botsford, explores its subject matter with the authority of a writer who understands what it means to live against your own nature in order to survive. The physical contrasts of Hana’s different worlds – the harsh village life, the exhilaration of university, the strangeness of the Washington suburbs – are described with the same piercing authenticity with which Dones delineates Hana’s inner terrain: her renunciation of her female identity and the halting, painful, joyful recovery of her sense of self.”